Even by the standards of Katie Mitchell's recent multimedia experiments,including Waves, Attempts On Her Life and Some Trace of Her, this latest venture pushes the boat out. While English National Opera's singers and orchestra render Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, live actors perform three stories of urban love and loss projected on to an overhanging screen. Add in poems by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and you have a serious case of sensory overload in which the multiple modern narratives distract from, rather than illuminate, the music.

Amanda Hale's Helen gazes wanly out of a rain-flecked bedsit window before taking an overdose. Sandy McDade's widowed Anna prowls around her kitchen and, while listening to Dido on the radio, does the domestic chores – thereby suggesting Purcell washes whiter. More cryptically, Dominic Rowan'sHenry sits in his study, parting, Aeneas-like, from his lover. But Purcell's music serves as a background to these three rather trite stories: a low point is reached when Dido's lament is accompanied by the sound of the suicidal Helen squeezing pills out of their packet.

Mitchell conjures up one or two beautiful art-movie images, such as a white curtain billowing in the breeze, but her experiment prompts several questions. Who exactly is it for? Purcell-lovers are likely to be disgruntled, while newcomers won't get the full intensity of the original opera. Isn't it also arrogant to assume a baroque opera can only be approached through updated accounts of dumped lovers? Nabokov says of great fiction that the lowest form of reader response is simply to identify with the characters. Maybe the best way to experience the intensity of Purcell's masterpiece is by making an imaginative leap into another world.

Tim Ashley, opera critic, writes:Though Mitchell's imagery is at times undeniably powerful, she also places the relationship between stage and music under strain. The quotes from Sexton and Plath grate on the fabric of Purcell's instrumentation, while the triple plot adds confusion to a work that for many is a model of narrative clarity. Above all, Mitchell's unremitting emphasis on despair fails to reflect the range of a score that actually encompasses great joy, too.

Conducted with considerable refinement by Christian Curnyn, the opera is for the most part finely sung. Though Mitchell fails to make a case for the doubling, Susan Bickley plays both Dido and the Sorceress, delivering Dido's arias with dignified intensity and inflecting the Sorceress's music with wonderfully understated malice. Adam Green, stressing Aeneas's weakness of will, hasn't quite got the full measure of the role, but Katherine Manley is a very gracious Belinda, and there's an elegant, tellingly regretful Sailor from Eyjólfur Eyjólfsson.